Vanity Fair contributing editor Sarah Ellison interviews Tony Blair for a wide-ranging article in which he defends his government advisory work, maintaining that it’s not as lucrative as people think, and describing it not as work for hire but as work that can change the character of countries. Defending conflict-of-interest claims, and referring to Tony Blair Associates, he says: “We have incredibly strict rules we apply.” Then, “I’m a private individual, I’m not a government department! One of the things people are going to have to get used to is: you are going to get leaders leaving office in their early 50s,” Blair says. “I have a lot of energy. I feel extremely fit. There’s no way I’m going to retire and play golf. You look at someone like Henry [Kissinger]. He’s 91 and he’s still going strong. I love that. Or Shimon Peres! These are my role models.” According to Ellison, Blair was willing to talk about any subject that might come up, and she writes that he was sometimes defensive, often eloquent, never at a loss for words.

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A Blair spokesperson tells Ellison that Blair’s net worth is “roughly equal to what he has given away” (about $15 million). But Ellison writes that there have been press reports claiming 10 times that amount. Blair recently told a gathering of supporters in London: “I read that I’m supposed to be worth £100 million. Cherie is asking where it is”; then, following warm laughter, he added that he wasn’t worth “a half of that, a third of that, a quarter of that, a fifth of that. I could go on.” Ellison writes that this is a surprising claim, since the Blair family’s real-estate holdings alone are reportedly worth about $47 million and encompass at least nine homes, including one each for Blair’s three adult children.

Ellison asks Blair if there is anyone he wouldn’t work for—specifically, what would he do if Putin called asking him to work as an adviser? She reports that Blair smiles, and switches the topic to Kazakhstan, later telling her: “I’m not holding my breath for the call from Putin.” But if it came?, she asks. “It won’t come, so let me not either praise or insult,” Blair replies.

Ellison also talks with former journalist and best-selling novelist Robert Harris, one of the best known of Blair’s long list of former friends. Of Blair’s overall career trajectory, Harris says, “I have a sense of tragedy about the whole thing—almost in a classic Greek sense of someone who is brought down in a way by their own talents, their own quality, that subtly sets in process their destruction.” Blair is “a very curious individual,” Harris tells Ellison. “The truth is whatever he perceives it to be at a given moment. I don’t think he’s ever really—I mean, lying. I think he becomes convinced at the moment he’s saying something that it’s true.”

According to Ellison, although Blair stoutly defends his actions with regard to Iraq and Afghanistan, he resents the fact that they have damaged his reputation irrevocably. “People say, ‘Why should you listen to him?’—because of Iraq. And I keep saying, that’s why you should listen to me,” Blair tells Ellison. “Because I’ve been through this in government, and since leaving office I’ve been studying it the whole time. One thing that is quite interesting to me is how poor Western governments are at the moment—and I don’t exempt mine from this—how poor they are at understanding what’s going on in the world. I mean, I find my own understanding of the Middle East, but also further afield, just so much more sophisticated and deep [now] than the understanding I had in government, even with all that infrastructure”—the intelligence services and foreign office and so on.

Ellison asks Blair about the litany of criticism he faces, especially in his own country, due to his business deals and his handling of the Iraq war. “First of all, you know, I actually did win three elections, not lose them. I won the last election with a majority, even after Iraq.” Blair also tells her: “Whatever criticisms people have of me,” he said, “they’ve seldom thought of me as politically stupid.” Blair claims that the criticisms of him are overstated by British newspapers, and tells Ellison that what he had long felt to be one of his positive qualities had often led to a negative result: “I have always been a centrist politician and I remain a centrist politician. And the center, in my view, still has the true governing constituency of the country but not the governing constituency of the media. The right don’t like it because you used to win elections, and the left don’t like it because they think you sold out. . . . It’s multiplied because of the legacy of Iraq.”

Read more: the full story is available in the digital editions. Subscribe now for access. The magazine will be on national newsstands on December 9.